Whatever Happened to the Coffee Shop?

Somewhere between a ubiquitous diner and the proliferation of Starbucks stood a brief period where the independent coffee shop reigned supreme, and the chains on the rise were more than just app-driven money mills. Believe it or not, two decades ago, gastropubs and beer gardens weren't the way flannel-clad Gen Xers spent their evenings. There were bars, to be sure, mostly stuffed with stuffy parents sipping Manhattans and complaining about taxes, or sad dives not yet appreciated with a hip sense of irony. 

If we went out to drink, we went out: dance clubs, concert venues, warehouses that were loud, hot, and sweaty. Booze was incidental. Getting together "for a drink" was for old people and alcoholics. When the Slacker Generation gathered to watch the world pass us by, we met up at the coffee shop. 

On the heels of International Coffee Day (do we really need another "Day?"), it's clear that caffeine's addictive personality is sunny as ever. There are six Dunkin Donuts, four Starbucks, two Saxbys, and a La Colombe within two blocks of City Hall, and each does a brisk business. But each operates on a fast food franchise model, not under the cozy notion of a traditional cafe. Even Starbucks, arguably the end result of a fifty year American trend, pales in comparison to its past. Comfy chairs have been swapped out for metal stools which, like those at McDonald's or Burger King, are designed specifically to keep customers from lingering. 

It's unfortunate that an industry built on bringing people together in a warm and inviting atmosphere, welcoming them to lounge for hours, now so blatantly wants to get you and your money in and out as fast as possible. This says nothing of the hours, either. If you want to get out of the house after 7pm, you're options are severely limited. In fact, unless you want a cocktail or beer, there is almost nothing to do after dark.

What happened? Money is certainly a culprit, as is a spendthrift 21st Century culture of consumerism. As with everything, I'm sure technology can be to blame somehow. And of course, generational rifts drive new fads. Millennials will someday lament the loss of micro-brews the way our parents and grandparents may wonder whatever happened to the Supper Club. 

But this isn't exclusively a case of rosy memories and the frustrations of change. The loss of the independent coffee shop is one in a myriad of examples where another layer of our culture is stripped away on behalf of homogenization and the most profitable status quo. It's a bit odd that cafes have gone the way of music shops and bookstores despite offering one of the few products you can't buy on Amazon. Perhaps it was discarded by fickle Millennials, the coveted goldmine of marketing, because of its mere 90s-ness. 

Like all business trends in the 21st Century, metrics drive decisions. For all progressives like to tout a European ideal, they sure have a penchant for corporate creature comforts like Target and Chipotle. We should be embracing the notion that exponential profits and "going public" aren't the end-all goal in life, even business. Start patronizing employees who simply love their jobs. Why aren't we more reluctant to hand our hard earned cash over to corporate entities that view us as nothing more than aggregated data and a transaction?

Of course these are all subjects better fleshed out over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, were there such a place. Maybe we should turn down our nostalgia filters and start looking at Generation X for the insight we once offered, and not just an interim exercise in uselessness. We loved life as we watched it pass us by, and we refused to succumb to "The Man." I'm not sure when that turned into a bad thing, but probably somewhere around the first time a Millennial suggested how much better the world will be once the Civil Rights trail-blazing Baby Boomers start dying. 

They're cold. 

Generational debates are a minefield of conjecture, but there is something valid to be said of a demographic raised amid the isolated anonymity of the internet, and their resignation to corporate greed. Their relationships with the largest companies in the world - Apple, Facebook, Google - are every bit as intimate as, if not more so than, those of family and friends. To Millennials, Starbucks is a Mom and Pop and Amazon is Main Street U.S.A.

Wall Street won, and no one should think that's good. 

Some corporate ills are impossible to avoid - banks, credit cards, utilities, even careers - but we should all be less willing to sell out to those who only feign an interest in their customers' well being when it can be aggregated for a quarterly prospectus. Be less willing to be a number wherever possible, even if it means using cash in lieu of an app. Such tactics are paraded as streamlined simplicity but really just a nefarious way to continue making money off you long after you've left the store. 

We should all want an independent coffee shop at the corner of our block, not just for the coffee, but for everything it represents. 

Under Wonderland

Nothing anchors a neighborhood of a certain type like a new Whole Foods. Just ask the town behind SoDoSoPa. Directly across the street from the Dalian that hosts the upscale grocer, Tom Bock received approval to build a sleek mid-rise of 33 condos behind the Rodin Museum. The site has long been a literal hole in the ground, a gaping maw that exposes parking accessed from, well...I honestly have no idea how those cars get down there.

It's led at least one person to call this corner Hole Foods. 

The premier Parkway-adjacent address at 21st and Hamilton, and the already-excavated land, offer something the Dalian doesn't have: underground parking. A former project abandoned after the Great Recession had already begun construction, so aside from some concrete and rebar, the site is prepped. The Dalian greets Hamilton Street with a glassy facade, but hovers over 21st and buildings along Spring Garden with a hulking and uninviting parking garage. Tom Bock's condominium tower, designed by Cecil Baker & Partners, stands to be far more dynamic with the kind of sunken and unseen parking that should be the rule for all urban developments. 

Although Curbed and The Inquirer both mentioned the Rail Park's master plan, which runs through the defunct railroad tunnel that would become this project's parking garage, Friends of the Rail Park have yet to comment. 

They might not. The first phase of the Rail Park is scheduled to open this spring and the second phase hasn't been fleshed out. As mapped on the Friends' site, "The Cut" is the mostly-open rail canyon that ends near 22nd and Hamilton. "The Tunnel," easily the most ambitious piece of the park, runs under Pennsylvania Avenue before traveling parallel to the freight tracks that separate the Poplar neighborhood from Lemon Hill. The latter is a favorite of urban explorers and photographers attracted to its vaulted roof and unusual lighting, and easy access to something off-limits. That's also why it's on the Rail Park's site map. 

It is a stunning sight to behold, especially in its current state. But the Rail Park itself is a gamble, and how Phase 1 pans out will dictate how it moves forward. Often compared to Manhattan's High Line Park, the Reading Viaduct runs through a more rough-and-tumble part of town. Although Callowhill and Spring Garden are gentrifying rapidly (the Callowhill ZIP code is the forth fastest gentrifying in the country), it will be a long time before the Rail Park offers views of much more than parking lots. It's appeal, like its subterranean western extension, has always been in nature's reclamation and the excitement of trespassing. Sanitized as it will become as a park, it may simply become a place for neighborhood residents to walk their dogs once the novelty wears off. 

Even Manhattan's High Line, though lauded and popular, is new. Elevated parks aren't traditional and require structural maintenance, not just seasonal gardening. Time will tell if they're sustainable or if, even in Manhattan, they become the target of inevitable budget cuts down the road. The Rail Park's underground component is a greater gamble in that it's largely untested. While it's fascinating in its current state, it's a one- or two-time destination. As a recreational trail it's just long, dark, and monotonous. Once you leave "The Cut" you're essentially walking into an abandoned subway tunnel, and the westernmost end past the vaulted ceiling is not particularly interesting. In fact, it's western entrance is a bit frightening, coupled by the fact that you'll be walking through the massive, concrete catacomb alongside an active freight line. No amount of lighting will make anyone want to push a stroller through it for a mid-morning walk. 

Short of a mandatory Civic Design Review, Tom Back has what he needs to move forward with or without consensus from the Friends of the Rail Park. Given the infancy of the park, it would be hard for Friends to argue such a premier address remain a hole in the ground on the off-chance that they may someday find the means and need to open the tunnel to recreation. It may be for the best, too. Closing the hole will allow those vested in the Rail Park to focus all their efforts on the assets above the ground. Perhaps someday, "The Cut" will connect Callowhill to the heart of the Parkway District. In the meantime, the subterranean tunnel beneath Pennsylvania Avenue will remain the realm of the adventurous looking for more mystique than a park, deep beneath the confines of SoDoSoPa.

"Not on Rex Manning Day!"

Somewhere between the exhausting praise, disdain, and endless coverage of Millennials and their more-often-than-not parents, Baby Boomers, sit a once-explored, recently-forgotten, and now-nostalgic generation: Generation X. 

If you've ever looked up from a smartphone long enough to watch a movie you didn't live-Tweet, you probably know Reality Bites as the slow, pastiche, embodiment of this "slacker generation," one replete with our Patron Saints, Janeane Gerofalo and Winona Ryder. But set aside easy memes about childhood playground equipment and the first Motorola flip-phone for a minute and you might remember another film that encompasses so many of the cheesy, stereotypical trappings of late-Millennium youth that have become synonymous with the 1990s.

Like most teen comedies, from Grease to Mean Girls, there's nothing particularly novel about Empire Records, and at the time it was hardly a standout in the immediate wake of Clueless. At best it was a poorly performing sleeper that served as a 90 minute commercial for a great soundtrack. And maybe that's what it was, at least commercially. Although it's drawn a significant cult audience in those who may have borrowed it from an older sibling, and it lingers in the back of the mind of most late-Gen Xers who know we've seen it more than once but never really paid too much attention to it; all of us are loathe to admit that, realistically, it's not a great movie. 

But that doesn't mean it isn't a decent movie, and most importantly, a movie with heart. 

It's not without a jaded sense of irony that a movie centered around an independent record store desperate to stave off a corporate takeover was produced primarily as a vehicle to send teens and 20-somethings off to big businesses like Tower Records, Sam Goody, or Columbia House to buy the soundtrack. But it's also apparent that Carol Heikkinen's screenplay was intended to be something else entirely, an indie film when the genre meant something, and if you squint a bit - or ignore its high production value - you can still find fleeting moments of her vision. 

Before the likes of Napster, and obviously iTunes, local record stores (and their bookstore brethren) were faced with a similar threat from big box retailers. In a way, these retailers greased the wheels for internet competition by dulling our senses and our perception of what was truly independent. Conglomerates like Tower Records maintained the token gestures of stores like Empire with well trained staff and in-store concerts, so much so that when the time came, we lamented their loss nearly as much as those independent shops we lost before.

Of course the frustration over the loss of stores like Tower Records was more out of resignation than idealism. We knew Tower and The Wall were big business, but by the end of the 20th Century they were nearly all we had left, and we knew there was no way a brick-and-mortar record store could ever compete with the Silicon Valley's Borg. 

But that's exactly why, in hindsight, Empire Records means so much, maybe even more so than well crafted teen comedies of the 1990s with less corporate intentions. Empire Records doesn't just take us back to our youth the way Clueless does. It takes everyone back to the rift that separated one generation and the next, and introduced an entirely new way of shopping, living, and experiencing each other. 

Even at its most ordinary for the era, Empire Records is wrought with the personal inexperience of heartache that today's youth find largely online. Who of a certain age does remember, even relish in, that one we let get away or tried and lost, all without the passivity of dating apps and text messages? Even the worst experiences of our time are beautiful lessons and rosy memories that can't be challenged by today's coldly isolated technology. 

We don't love Empire Records for its cheesy sub-plots and dialogue, not literally (though we do love the music). We love it because it represents a place we once experienced that has yet to be replicated. Like the coffee shops synonymous with other '90s classics like Singles and Friends, we watch Empire Records and see a kind of engagement that's gone. We used to hang out at the record store, day or night, drinking coffee or a Big Gulp or from a flask. We related to each other universally outside the confines of texts, SnapChat, or Facebook. It's a type of casual relationship that's been near-completely lost to Tinder, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Who walks into a bar or coffee shop hoping to bump into a friend, not knowing if they'll be there? More so, who goes to a store hoping for the same, and then just hangs out with the staff? 

There is something strong, almost baser, about the excitement of never knowing and the need for this kind of dynamic interaction.

We were called "slackers" because we hung out in record stores, coffee shops, and bookstores, apparently waiting for life to happen. But we weren't: we were soaking up the buzz of life constantly happening around us, all the time, everywhere. We invented the term "people-watching" because people are the most interesting things to watch.

And can anyone really call us slackers in the face of a generation that prefers Amazon and GrubHub to walking to the corner store to interact with someone, all so they can spend more time binge watching the same show the watched last week? The only thing our successors have managed to prove is how lonely laziness and convenience can be, and in the face of an Empire Records' Broadway revival, that a lot of people long for the kind of interaction we have all since discarded. 

Pod Hotel

The hospitality industry is no joke. But it's also one that, at least for the last fifty or so years, has been steeped in the expected. That works for me. I'm more interested in the destination than the stay, so any clean bed will do.

Yet with the upcoming W Hotel and several Kimptons, it's clear that those visiting Philadelphia, or perhaps just spending a night in town, are looking for something more dynamic than the flagship name of a major national chain. 

So bring on the Pod Hotel. Occupying a vacant parcel on 19th Street and a parking lot along Ludlow, the Pod by Modus Hotels and Parkway Corporation won't win any awards for its exterior design, but it will be welcome infill for this long gaping property smack in the middle of the business district. 

While there's no shortage of entertainment in the area, one curious venue stands a few doors down from the proposed hotel's Ludlow entrance. If you think the XXX Forum Theater was gone you'd be wrong. It simply moved a few blocks to this tony address. It will be interesting to see how the hip and trendy guests of the Pod Hotel decide to interact with the sex club next door. 

East Market

With the first phase of East Market nearing completion, it's about time we starting hearing about the tenants who stand to redefine this long neglected thoroughfare. The massive project is no doubt exciting, and Iron Hill Brewery is slated to anchor part of the ground floor. 

But signage has already appeared on the prime corner location at 11th Street, and it's a SMDH moment that should make everyone scream "this is why we can't have nice things!"

Yes, that's an AT&T store. Bring on the glamour!

Bait and Switch at Jewelers Row?

Philadelphia's architecture czar, Inga Saffron, is nothing if not critical and she hasn't held back when it comes to Toll Brothers' proposed tower for historic Jewelers Row. When she referred to SLCE's rendering as a "zombie" back in February she may have been speaking about more than just the vacant aesthetic of the building, but the likelihood that the proposal is already dead. Among all parties involved - the Design Advocacy Group, the Preservation Alliance, the Historical Commission, L&I, and City Hall; not to mention numerous online journals like PhillyMag and Curbed Philly - Saffron seems to be the only one willing to sift through the mounting meta data that suggests exactly that.

Toll Brothers has already received approval from the city and returned to the drawing board more than the two required of the Design Advocacy Group, yet the site remains motionless and no timelines have been offered. Aside from readying the proper paperwork, Toll Brothers is likely assessing the profitability of the endeavor, if they ever planned to embark upon construction themselves at all. 

As Saffron pointed out, Toll Brothers has done this before. Abandoning a project that ultimately meant the demolition of the historic Society Hill Playhouse and the redevelopment of a vacant lot on Rittenhouse Square, Toll Brothers simply readied the sites for development then flipped the land for a profit. 

Until the latest rendering, Toll's tower on Jewelers Row didn't have any private balconies, one of its largest criticisms considering it is intended to be a luxury residential property. It looked more like an office building. They've since added balconies, but only nine and all pointed north, none facing Washington Square Park. 

It's becoming clear that this is less of a realistic proposal and more a marketing brochure for speculators. Of course, if Toll flips it to a developer more attune to urban architecture, and certainly more daring, this may be good for Jewelers Row. When it comes to urban development, nothing is worse for an eclectic location than a publicly traded company that traffics in the status quo. Toll Brothers isn't necessarily bad at what they do: clear-cutting farmland for bloated mini-mansions. But high-rises and skyscrapers aren't disposable and they alter our skylines ideally forever. SLCE's best rendering to date is blandly corporate, but this is characteristic for Toll Brothers. 

The firm doesn't aim at wealthy eccentrics who want to live in a work of art. They aim squarely at the upper tier of the middle class, a wide range of consumers with disposable income who like trendy sameness. They aim at consumers who shop at Whole Foods and lease BMWs. They aim for the most people with the most money. And sadly, most people don't like bold architecture or care enough about history to sacrifice amenities and luxuries. 

But flipping it to another developer is also an architectural gamble. Any firm that could afford Toll's ready-to-build site will be looking for the same exponential profit. SLCE's most recent rendering may simply be a best case scenario, one that could result in demolition for far blander, low-rise infill. A similar bait-and-switch played out on the 1100 block of Chestnut where CREI commissioned a rendering of Winka Dubbeldam's wild Unknot Tower only to flip the land for Blackney Hayes' Collins apartments, the exact kind of dull-your-senses infill we could get out of Jewelers Row.

Unfortunately, given that this probable outcome isn't a bigger source of contention suggests that all those involved in historic preservation aren't intuitively prepared for this scenario. Looking back on this and similar situations, the Preservation Alliance, Design Advocacy Group, and neighborhood organizations look foolish questioning the aesthetics of buildings developers never intended to build. Buildings are astronomical efforts, and much of that comes from just the initial bureaucracy of getting them approved. I'd be curious to hear Toll's response if someone at the Design Advocacy Group had asked if they actually intended on building this tower. 

Savvy developers have gotten good at using bureaucracy to their advantage. With far more resources at their disposal than advocacy groups, lengthy meetings and flashy renderings distract preservationists from inferring what may be happening behind the scenes. Preservationists too often wind up looking like children fussing over a drawing, while developers and their lawyers laugh their way through red tape.

Philadelphia's Preservation Crisis

Like many publicly operated organizations, the city's preservation task force has already proven itself useless. That's a chore in itself given it isn't even a year old. From HUD to the EPA, sometimes I wonder why we invest so much in publicly operated groups. Given their political nature, they shift in purpose through administrations and are often defunct byproducts of campaign promises that never fully emerge. 

There's simply no money in altruism, and like for-profit corporations that serve only Wall Street, publicly funded advocacy only subsists as political stock. 

Simply put, the investment in public preservation advocacy would be better spent on the organizations that have no vested interest in demolition and redevelopment. The very fact that private developers, publicly traded firms, and a City Council that banks political capital from redevelopment is in any way involved with the city's Historical Commission, Licenses and Inspections office, or Design Advocacy Group is a huge conflict of interest. Preservation and its impact on our urban fabric should be left exclusively to the experts trained in historic preservation with no interest in anything else, and its autonomy should be heeded. 

In nearly all realms of public life, officials defer to privately funded experts. Allowing the Historical Commission, a tag tag gang of bureaucratic flunkies, to decide what goes, often at the behest of millionaire property developers claiming economic hardship, is no different than Betsy DeVos running slipshod through our public education system. Why are we outraged by one and not the other? Both are charged with one responsibility, enacting the opposite. 

Of course granting private groups like the Preservation Alliance absolute power over historic preservation is a tough sell. There's the knee-jerk assumption that private advocacy with too much authority can run rampant over the financial realities of any municipality. But time and again, advocates - from preservationists to gun reformists - have proven themselves nothing if not compromising. Barring the most storied of historical sites, only facades command preservation in Philadelphia (though the loss of the Boyd Theater's auditorium may, hopefully, challenge this caveat). 

The preservation crisis in Philadelphia can't be understated. Arguably as historic as Boston but considerably poorer, a recent influx of residents, mostly young or empty nested, has overtaken the priorities of our schools and our beleaguered history. In the decades since the New Deal era, Philadelphia's history survived in a preserved decay, uncataloged and untouched by the happenstance of neglect and a lack of development. Enticed by unfamiliar growth for the first time in nearly a century, City Hall and the campaigns of all those within have been fixated on the city's transformation, more often than not to the detriment of our history.

Charged with the task of organizing that history, private groups are so bogged down with the need for proposed landmarks threatened by development that only the most notable find a home on their lists. And even then, it's meaningless when the Historical Commission is so liberal with granting hardships to developers who simply don't want to salvage a portion of a facade. Meanwhile, incidental row homes built to last forever are routinely swapped out, blocks clear-cut, for new construction chock full of amenities, aimed at transplants with no concern for history, constructed to last maybe a few decades. 

When America's economy finally began to rebound from the Great Depression in the 1980s, it was through a culture of disposability. Everything from phones to cars to homes are designed to be temporary, and it's become our biggest enemy. Preservationists haven't been able to recon with the profitable nature of development itself, acting on the blind assumption that most people would like to save old buildings, and sacrifice luxury and convenience to do so. The only way they can move past this, and possibly be expected to professionally interact with and influence the very nature of our disposable culture is by granting them the autonomy and authority to do what they are academically prepared for: protecting our history in spite of developers equally vested in profitably maximizing every square inch.

City Hall can't be expected to do this, and maybe we shouldn't want it to. American culture, as much as our fickle desire for fast fashion housing, is driven by individualistic civic engagement. Maybe it's time we hand the reigns of preservation power over to those who actually care about it.